“Whether The Pretense Makes Sense Is Irrelevant”: The War On Voting In A Post Voting Rights Act World Just Got Worse
In North Carolina, thanks to Republican gains in the 2010 state elections, the congressional district lines already drawn in such a comically gerrymandered way, the state’s delegation bears little resemblance to the actual wishes of voters. In 2012, for example, a majority of North Carolinians voted for Democratic congressional candidates, and yet, only 4 of the state’s 13 members of the U.S. House are Democrats.
But as the Los Angeles Times reports today, that’s apparently not quite good enough for GOP state policymakers. In a story Rachel has covered on the show, now that the district lines have been gerrymandered to ensure a Republican advantage regardless of voters’ wishes, the next step is to restrict voters’ access to their own democracy.
The GOP chairman of the state Senate rules committee, Sen. Tom Apodaca, said he would move quickly to pass a voter ID law that Republicans say would bolster the integrity of the balloting process. GOP leaders also began engineering an end to the state’s early voting, Sunday voting and same-day registration provisions, all popular with black voters. Civil rights groups say the moves are designed to restrict poll access by blacks, who vote reliably Democratic.
Up until about a week ago, this would ordinarily be the point at which voting-rights advocates, civil rights activists, and anyone concerned with voter access and election fairness would say, “Whew, it’s a good thing the Voting Rights Act still exists. There’s no way these North Carolina’s measures will pass muster.”
But all of that changed rather abruptly when five justices on the U.S. Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act and gave GOP policymakers in North Carolina and elsewhere a green light to start restricting Americans’ access to the ballot box. It is open season on voting rights and Republicans throughout the South are seizing the opportunity.
Originally, GOP lawmakers in North Carolina held back on pursuing voter-ID laws, knowing how racially discriminatory they are. But thanks to the Supreme Court, they no longer care.
What’s especially interesting to me as how thin the pretense is. At least on the surface, Republicans say they need to impose the harshest voting restrictions since Jim Crow to prevent “voter fraud.” In reality, such fraud is practically non-existent, but it nevertheless serves as a convenient pretense. But how does ending Sunday voting prevent fraud? Why eliminate early-voting opportunities and make longer voting lines, neither of which relate to fraud at all?
Of course, questions like these only matter if there’s a real debate, and with Republicans controlling North Carolina’s legislature and governor’s office, whether the pretense makes sense or not is apparently irrelevant.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 2, 2013
“An Extension Of The GOP”: The Republicans Of The Supreme Court
In order to fully understand what the five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have been up to when they make decisions that affect our democracy, as they did last week on voting rights, you need to understand what the Republican Party has been up to.
The modern GOP is based on an unlikely coalition of wealthy business executives, small business owners, and struggling whites. Its durability depends on the latter two categories believing that the economic stresses they’ve experienced for decades have a lot to do with the government taking their money and giving it to the poor, who are disproportionately black and Latino.
The real reason small business owners and struggling whites haven’t done better is the same as most of the rest of America hasn’t done better: Although the output of Americans has continued to rise, almost all the gains have gone to the very top.
Government is implicated, but not in the way wealthy Republicans want the other members of their coalition to believe. Laws that the GOP itself championed (too often with the complicity of some Democrats) have trammeled unions, invited outsourcing abroad, slashed taxes on the rich, encouraged takeovers, allowed monopolization, reduced the real median wage, and deregulated Wall Street.
Four decades ago, the typical household’s income rose in tandem with output. But since the late 1970s, as these laws took hold, most Americans’ incomes have flattened. Had the real median household income continued to keep pace with economic growth it would now be almost $92,000 instead of $50,000.
Obviously, wealthy Republicans would rather other members of their coalition not know any of this — including, especially, their role in making it happen. Their nightmare is small-business owners and struggling whites joining with the poor and the rest of the middle class to wrest economic power away. So they’ve created a convenient scapegoat in America’s minority underclass, along with a government that supposedly taxes hardworking whites to support them.
This is where the five Republican appointees to the Supreme Court have played, and continue to play, such an important role.
First, wealthy Republicans have to be able to spend as much money as possible to bribe lawmakers to do their bidding, tell their version of history, and promulgate several big lies (the poor are “takers not makers,” government keeps them “dependent,” the wealthy are “job-creators” so cutting their taxes creates more jobs, unions are bad, regulations reduce economic growth, and so on).
The five Republicans on the Supreme Court have obliged by eviscerating campaign finance laws. Their 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, along with the broad interpretations given it by several appellate judges (also Republican appointees), has opened the money floodgates.
Second, wealthy Republicans want to quietly reduce the impact of any laws that might limit their profits, even though they may help struggling whites as consumers or employees. The easiest way to execute this delicate maneuver is to make it harder to sue under such laws.
Here, too, the five Republicans on the Court have been eager to oblige by tightening requirements for class actions and limiting standing to sue. In their recent Comcast Corp. v. Behrend decision, for example, they threw out $875 million in damages that a group of Philadelphia-area subscribers had sought from the cable giant, reasoning that the subscriber plaintiffs hadn’t proven they constituted a “class” for the purpose of a class action.
Third and finally, wealthy Republicans want to minimize the votes of poor and minority citizens – and further propagate the myth that these people are responsible for the economic problems of struggling whites – through state redistricting and gerrymandering, voter-identification requirements at polling stations, and the use of almost any pretext to purge minority voters from voting lists.
The five Republicans on the Court obliged last week by striking down a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that sets the formula under which states with a long history of discrimination must ask the federal government or a judge for approval before changing their voting procedures.
The significance of Shelby County, Alabama vs. Holder was made plain Thursday when the Court effectively nullified two cases involving Texas voter laws by sending them back to lower courts to reconsider in light of Shelby. One was a voter identification requirement, enacted in 2011, that a federal judge had rejected on grounds that it imposed a disproportionate burden on lower-income people, many of whom are minorities. The other was a redistricting plan, also rejected by a federal court, in part because it would block minorities from gaining a majority vote in almost all districts.
But now both are effectively reinstated, as are the efforts of several other states to suppress votes.
Supreme Court justices are appointed for life in order to ensure their independence from politics. But when it comes to the core political strategy of the Republican Party, the five Republican appointees are, in effect, an extension of the GOP.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, July 1, 2013
“A City Of The First Class”; Federal Court Upholds Ban On Undocumented Immigrant Renters, Ruling Cities Can Keep People Out
In a significant win for the anti-immigrant movement, a federal appeals court upheld a Nebraska city’s statute Friday that bans renting property to undocumented immigrants, holding that the law was neither preempted by federal law nor discriminatory.
In a 2-1 opinion, Judge James B. Loken rejected the rulings of several other federal appeals courts that federal immigration regulation precludes local prohibitions on the “harboring” of undocumented immigrants. Reasoning that cities and states are perfectly entitled to keep undocumented immigrants out of their borders, Loken and fellow Republican appointee Steven Colloton upheld a statute making it unlawful to hire, rent to, or otherwise “harbor” an undocumented person in Fremont, Nebraska, dubbed a “city of the first class.”
“Laws designed to deter, or even prohibit, unlawfully present aliens from residing within a particular locality are not tantamount to immigration laws establishing who may enter or remain in the country,” Loken, a former Nixon advisor and George H.W. Bush appointee, wrote for the majority.
In support of this proposition, Loken cites to a footnote in a U.S. Supreme Court decision that, ironically, affirmed the right of undocumented children to obtain a public education. In that footnote, the court recognized, as an aside totally separate from the contrary holding in the case, that a law is not necessarily invalid merely because it imposes an unequal burden on undocumented immigrants.
Fremont’s law does far more than impose an unequal burden on undocumented immigrants. In requiring all rental applicants to register with the city and prove their citizenship, the city of Fremont is not only effectively removing many undocumented immigrants from its jurisdiction; it is also making its own separate determination of lawful presence in the United States, without the assessment and due process that accompanies federal removal.
Just last year, the U.S. Supreme Court reiterated the breadth of federal supremacy in the field of immigration law in striking down key elements of Arizona’s controversial SB 1070, writing that no state or local government is allowed to “achieve its own immigration policy.” And as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit explained in striking down an almost identical provision prohibiting the “harboring” of illegal immigrants, these sorts of local laws attempt to remove undocumented persons from the city “based on a snapshot of their current immigration status, rather than based on a federal order of removal.” Dissenting judge Myron Bright explained:
This produces conflict with federal law because unlawful presence or undocumented status is not in every case equivalent with removability or with eventual removal. “Under federal law, an unlawful immigration status does not lead instantly, or inevitably, to removal.” Additionally, undocumented persons are afforded numerous procedural protections under federal law before an order of removal may issue. The federal government will sometimes exercise its discretion not to prosecute a removal, “thereby tacitly allow[ing] the presence of those whose technical status remains ‘illegal.’ ” Even once a removal proceeding is commenced, it is far from certain it will result in removal.
This ruling is a major win for Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who profited handsomely from drafting this provision for Fremont and several other cities around the country.
By: Nicole Flatow, Think Progress, July 1, 2013
“Having Trouble Hearing Women’s Voices”: Texas GOP Unleashes Political Quackery On Women’s Reproductive Rights
A few years ago, during consideration of a bill being pushed by a Republican elder in the Texas Senate, first-term Sen. Wendy Davis asked him a question about it. Rather than respond to this Democrat, this woman, the old bull replied dismissively, “I have trouble hearing women’s voices.”
No more. Even a stone-deaf old bull would’ve been jerked to attention by the clarity of Davis’ voice on June 25. Starting at 11:18 a.m., she literally stood tall for more than 11 grueling hours, filibustering a mean and demeaning attempt by extremist Republican leaders to put the state government in charge of the most personal right women have: controlling decisions about their own bodies.
Davis’ principled stand — in Texas, no less — rallied over 2,000 mothers, grandmothers, girls and others to come to the capitol from all over the state, packing the gallery in quiet witness. Quiet until 10:04 p.m., that is, when GOP leaders tried to silence her by unilaterally ruling her filibuster over.
Suddenly, the ruling Solons were startled by a high-decibel reprimand from their subjects — the gallery erupted in citizen outrage, causing chaos on the floor. Then, when the “leaders” tried to force a vote, the “followers” took charge, with jeers so loud that senators couldn’t hear themselves. With the session set to expire at midnight, panicky leaders tried to push the clock back, which led to deafening chants of “shame, shame, shame,” ultimately blocking the GOP’s brutish ploy.
Texas Republicans have already re-rigged the rules so they can get their way on another day, but they can’t escape the huge significance of this defeat. As Davis rightfully noted, while she was the one standing on the floor, “it was the ‘people’s filibuster’ that stopped (the bill)” and awakened a new movement in Texas that won’t be stopped.
Texas has long experience with animalistic approach to public policy. In 2007, a local school superintendent rejected any need for sex education classes in his district. Noting that many students there live on farms, he said, “They get a pretty good sex education from their animals.”
Guess which state is No. 1 in teen pregnancies? Yes, Texas.
And who should be the ones to make medical decisions about pregnancies? Not women and their doctors. They might choose “wrong” over the doctrine of certain religious groups. Rather, the macho Republican autocrats and theocrats who now reign over state government say they are the ones to decide such deeply personal matters. How embarrassing for these political bullies, then, to have had their repressive, extremist and dangerous anti-choice legislation derailed by … well, by women.
“An unruly mob,” cried the lieutenant governor as he fled the capitol. One GOP lawmaker tremulously tweeted that Davis, the opposition leader, was a “terrorist.” And Gov. Rick “Oops” Perry ran away to Dallas, where he whimpered that the people’s assertion of citizens’ authority was a “hijacking of the democratic process.” Odd concept: The people “hijacking” democracy.
All this from “leaders” who blatantly hijacked the rules to shut down Davis’ gutsy filibuster. In 2011, these same wimps even tried to hijack Davis’ Senate district by illegally shoving more than half of her minority precincts into neighboring districts — a racist ploy that federal judges overturned. And now Perry is trying to hijack reality, huffing and puffing that he’ll slap down the women’s opposition to his assault on their rights, because that’s “what the people of this state hired us to do.”
Get a grip, Rick. In a June poll, 63 percent of registered Texas voters said we already have plenty of anti-abortion laws on the books, and nearly three-fourths of the people (including 6 out of 10 Republicans) say such personal medical decisions should be made by women and their doctors, not by political quacks masquerading as Talibanic moral arbitrators. And 81 percent say the legislature should focus on basic economic issues wracking the majority of Texans.
Davis pointed out that far from helping the economic plight of women in the Lone Star State, he vetoed the equal-pay-for-equal-work bill recently passed by the legislature. How rude of her!
By: Jim Hightower, The National Memo, July 3, 2013
“White Sale”: The “Missing White Voter”
I’ve been writing about this for the last week in the context of Sean Trende’s analysis of ethnic and racial voting data. But MSNBC’s Benjy Sarlin has an excellent summary of the gradual but steady conversion of conservative gabbers from the belief that securing a higher share of the Latino vote is an ontological necessity for the GOP to the very, very different conviction that the GOP’s salvation lies in an enhanced appeal to the same white voters that already compose nearly all of its “base.”
After November’s stunning loss, an array of influential Republicans argued that immigration reform was the party’s best chance to claim Latino voters before they become permanent Democrats. But in a mere eight months, a counter-narrative has taken hold in conservative circles, nurtured by a shrewd group of anti-immigration lobbyists and Tea Party enthusiasts. The new argument sees immigration reform at best as a divisive distraction from the GOP’s real problem of countering “white flight” from the polls. At worst, they view it as an electoral apocalypse, a seventh seal behind which lies an unbroken line of future Democratic presidents.
Sarlin sees this “counter-narrative” largely as a backlash against “Republican establishment” voices telling conservatives something they really, really didn’t want to hear (it’s no accident that Rush Limbaugh was among the first and most consistent in rejecting the Latino Imperative proposition). But he notes that some influential figures, particularly on Fox News, have switched from one theory to another as conservative opposition to immigration reform has intensified:
[T]he anti-immigration argument appears to be gaining converts fast. On election night, Fox News anchor Brit Hume called the “demographic” threat posed by Latino voters “absolutely real” and suggested Mitt Romney’s “hardline position on immigration” may be to blame for election losses. On Monday, Hume declared that argument “baloney.” The Hispanic vote, he said, “is not nearly as important, still, as the white vote.”
Sean Hannity, a reliable bellwether on the right, has been on a similar journey since the fall. He announced the day after President Obama’s re-election that he had “evolved” on immigration reform and now supported a “path to citizenship” in order to improve relations with Hispanic voters. Hannity has now flipped hard against the Senate’s bill. “Not only do I doubt the current legislation will solve the immigration problem,” he wrote in a June column, “but it also won’t help the GOP in future elections.”
Hannity and Hume didn’t arrive at their latest destination by accident. They’re just the latest figures on the right to embrace the compelling new message that’s whipping Republicans against immigration reform while still promising a better tomorrow for the GOP’s presidential candidates.
Sarlin notes the particular role played by the highly-reputed number-cruncher Sean Trende and the influential conservative journalist Byron York (who unlike Trende has been crusading against the Gang of Eight immigration bill) in making this inherently attractive-to-conservatives argument (I’ve called it a bottomless crack pipe for the Right) respectable. Their work is particularly popular, unfortunately, among those who deliberately ignore what Trende and York say about the kind of white voters who “went missing” in 2012 and the unconventional things Republicans need to do to appeal to them:
York and Trende have some nuanced ideas about how the GOP can accomplish what Romney failed to do, many of which involve tacking left on the economy. But to the talk radio right, the main takeaway is that there are several million angry white votes ripe for the taking if the party can swing even more to the right.
White voters stayed home, Limbaugh said in May, because “they didn’t think the Republican Party was conservative enough….”
“Their idea seems to be gaining currency,” Frank Sharry, executive director of immigration advocacy group America’s Voice, told MSNBC. “Right after the election most of the conservative commentariat said they had to do something to get right with Latino voters. Now there seems to be this bizarre conversation that could only happen in the conservative bubble about how Romney didn’t win because he didn’t mobilize enough white voters.”
Underlying these claims is a belief that Romney lost because he was a blue-blooded moderate who failed to connect to conservative white voters on a visceral level. Nominate an American bad-ass in 2016 and those missing whites will reappear in a hurry.
Bingo. It’s more or less the same rationalization conservatives offered for losing in 2008, as well: a nominee too moderate for the “conservative majority” who was laboring under the false premise that his past support for comprehensive immigration reform would win him Latino support.
The bottom line here is that selling conservatives on a particularly self-serving version of the “missing white voter” theory is the easiest sale imaginable, and they are accordingly buying it like hot cakes. That’s bad news for those who favor immigration reform, and even worse news for those who dream of a political environment in which racial and ethnic conflict is not constantly lurking in the background.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 2, 2013
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